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fingertips touched the cold smooth surface of the gem was the double bang of two police-issue nine millimeters firing at my heart.

CHAPTER FIVE
    TRAPPED!
    A t first I thought they’d hit me. It sure as hell felt like something hit me. There was an impact like a car wreck, but no noise except weird voices jabbering in my ears, and no sensation except a cold like skinny-dipping at the North Pole. Then I was falling.
    Forever.
    Okay, not forever. ’Cause, you know, eventually I woke up. It sucked.
    Like when I’d done this before, I came to buck-naked with the bed-spins making me feel like I was doing loop-de-loops even though I was lying still. Unlike the time before, I hurt everywhere. All my various aches and pains, which I’d been a little too busy to pay attention to in my last minutes on Earth, all lined up front and center and shouted, “Ma’am, yes ma’am! All present and accounted for, Ma’am!”
    My butt and legs throbbed where I’d landed on ’em after falling over the suitcase. The cuts on my knuckles and arm throbbed and stung like someone had poured rubbing alcohol on them, and they were still bleeding—like, a lot—but those were nothing compared the pain in my chest. My ribs ached like—well, like I’d dropped a safe on them—which I had. I felt like I couldn’t catch my breath, and I got nasty zings all down my sides every time I tried.
    Worse than that, I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t even know for sure if I was on Waar. I’d had the idea—stupid, I know—that I’d show up in the same place I had last time. No such luck. There were no wide, blue-flowered plains around me. No saw-toothed mountains on the horizon. No horizon at all. In fact, if I hadn’t known better, I woulda sworn I’d ended up in some VIP lounge at the Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta.
    I was in a high, round room that looked like it had been designed by Swedish people in the seventies—all egg shapes and white plastic walls and arched doors as tall and wide as the back end of an eighteen-wheeler—and no furniture, just the white marble disk I was lying on, and a console by the door that looked like an ATM. Recessed lighting glowed the same soft white as the walls, and an electronic chime filled the room with a mellow GOONG sound. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a place so clean-looking in all my life, and it made the hackles rise on my neck, ’cause no part of Waar I’d been to had been this spotless, this white, or this high tech.
    Where the fuck was I? Had the damn teleport thingy sent me to the wrong planet? It had to be. Waar had been nothing but stone and red dust, and they’d barely invented the wheel. I rolled over, groaning as my ribs stabbed me in seven different places, and looked for the gem in the center of the disk. I had to get out of here before whoever lived here found me and did science experiments on me.
    The gem was glowing. It was working! I could get back! I reached out my bleeding hand to slap it, then stopped. What was I thinking? It was only seconds after I’d left Mrs. Gardner’s attic. I’d be going back to the cops searching for me under the boxes, and if I suddenly popped back in front of them they were going to shoot first and ask questions later. Even if they didn’t fill me full of holes, I’d be arrested for breaking and entering, assault, and of course the manslaughter rap I’d been running from the first time I touched one of these gems. Maybe I’d better see what was up on this end of the interstellar poop chute after all.
    I got my arms under me and pushed up—and sent myself flying sideways to land on my face and shoulder. It hurt, but I couldn’t stop laughing—which hurt more. What a fucking idiot. You woulda thought this time I woulda expected a different gravity, but, well, gravity is one of those things you take for granted—like a pocket you keep reaching for even when you’re wearing the pants without the pocket. You’re kinda